In Ice, In Fire
by starry-eyes184
Summary: They're really more of a cautionary tale than a love story. /VictoireTeddyDominique/ 3 parts
1. In Ice

A/N: Or, alternatively titled, In Which Everyone Is Especially Unhappy But Nothing Really Happens. Except me maybe getting a bit heavy-handed with the extended metaphors. Oh well, please do tell me what you think, I'm quite anxious to hear!

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_Chapter 1: In Ice_

_I. _

Victoire smokes.

She doesn't think that Teddy knows, but he does. Of course he does, because he knows everything about her, like she knows everything about him. It's always been this way, and it always will be. Since that chilly, enchanted winter morning when his dull gray eyes peeked over the edge of her pram and he saw her. He saw everything. Still, she carries on with her illusive ways, as if he wouldn't notice the stale scent of cigarettes lingering on her pastel colored cloaks and wound around the strands of her blonde hair. Teddy isn't quite sure when or why she started her dirty little habit, but he wishes she would quit, or at the very least confess, because it's getting harder and harder to pretend not to know.

At half past two, like clockwork, Vic carefully untwines herself from his comfortable embrace. She slips out a single cigarette from the pack she's spellotaped to the bottom of their bed frame. Perched on the edge of the mattress, body hunched and arched protectively over her thin secret, she waits _one, two, three _beats before lighting up. The smell of the sulfur from the ignited match burns his nostrils and he can see the vague yellow-orange glow of the flame from closed eyelids.

The first drag, her soft exhaled hiss of satisfaction, is always in the bedroom.

Teddy listens to the sound of her feet padding across the hardwood floor and wonders if maybe she wants to be caught. If maybe she's out there waiting for him to clamor after her and say something, do something to acknowledge that he already knows, like he always does, because that's the way it's supposed to be between the two of them. He should do it. If not to soothe away her concerns, then to expose her dishonesty.

But it's cold outside of the cocoon of blankets. Victoire is already long gone out onto the fire escape, her ashes flicked into the late February air, so he lets it go.

In the morning she smells like sugared violets and smiles blindingly at him, and so it doesn't really matter in the end, after all.

_II._

They let their families pretend they're the perfect couple.

"Made for each other," Ginny coos, grinning at them.

"Destiny, of course," Harry adds, winking across the table.

It feels natural, mostly, because the root of their union runs deep into the past. Neither one of them can really remember a time when they didn't silently belong to each other. But occasionally when there's talk of stars and fate and perfect matches, he gets this queasy feeling like ice water dripping down his spine. Teddy knows Vic gets it too, because sometimes her eyes meet his and she fills her blackened lungs with air like she's trying not to suffocate under the pressure of it all.

They're two dolls, with pink plastic lips pressed together, living out someone else's fantasy in a cutout dream house.

He feels no guilt in this.

The family returns to the meal, laughing and clinking silverware against plates as they take up steaming forkfuls of spicy food. Teddy lets his fork lie untouched, instead taking a strange sort of solace from the sudden cool touch of Victoire's thin hand in his. He meets her ice-colored eyes and shares a smile, his heart skipping a beat at the loveliness of her smooth, pale face. With a quick movement, Teddy wraps her hand in both of his, encasing them in the warmth of his skin.

Later, when he is drowning her in kisses, and she is inspiring great shivers up his spine with the sweep of her fingertips, Teddy pretends not to taste the cigarettes in the corners of her mouth. Her lies are bitter against his tongue and her hands are freezing as they run through the turquoise hair at his forehead. But in time they warm, and in time he finds he can taste only what he has come to know as her.

The stars and all the destiny that is written in them burn outside their bedroom in the inky blue sky, and if he has to live out his life in a doll house Teddy is glad for her company.

_III._

Victoire doesn't quit and he doesn't sleep.

His body has attuned itself to her habit, to the cold, widening empty space on her side of the bed as she prepares for her nightly ritual. Teddy's getting to be quite exceptional at feigning sleep and ignorance. It is for this reason that at ten of two one drizzling Monday, they're both already awake when she arrives. There is a soft, familiar _crack_ that echoes down the corridor, a sure sign of apparition. They give up the pretense of sleep and rise immediately, the ever-cautious children of war. The light of their wands reaches copper-red waves splayed over apple-red robes and Victoire is breezing past him, arms outstretched and open even before Teddy fully realizes it's her sister. It is an unexpected visit, but Vic doesn't think about Dominique's motives.

She doesn't ask the right questions because she doesn't want to hear the wrong answers.

Teddy doesn't know how to greet Dominique. They've got this bizarre sort of understanding that they're strangers in company and company in solitude, but he isn't sure if this counts as either so he tries to meet her in the middle and nods at her. As she looks out through the curtain of Vic's long blonde hair, her dark eyes give off sparks and she is swaying because she never really stops dancing. But Teddy doesn't know if he's supposed to notice that, either, so he stays silent and wraps his arms around himself to keep out the chill.

"It's so good to see you, Dom. We've missed you."

Dominique's freckled face splits into a wide grin and she and Vic are looking at only each other. He fades into the background, as significant as steam or shadow. This is the sort of moment where he doesn't matter, where the blood that beats in the both of them means more than what or who might encourage it to beat faster. He doesn't intend to break it, but it happens anyway.

Teddy moves or he breathes or he doesn't, and he can feel the magic shatter as both pairs of eyes land on him.

_IV._

Dominique tears down a calendar page and the seasons begin to change.

During the three weeks she's been here Teddy's begun to feel his world enter that in-between stage. Winter grips his bones, clings greedily to the frosty, frozen earth with barren icy fingertips. He knows it isn't quite time yet to shed the false warmth he finds in sweaters, to pack away the thick socks and cloaks and all the weariness sewn into their threads. But he wants to. Some mornings, he goes out to the fire escape dusted in ash. He wears no cloak and no thick socks and the wind bites at the skin on his wrists, stinging and burning until he's nearly numb. The sun is warm on his cheeks, though, and the birds are chirping melodies from the branches of budding trees. Dominique joins him on occasion. She talks about the clothes in France and the dragons in Romania and the sea, always the sea.

Her deep scarlet curls catch the wind and blow in all directions, and her long white fingers curl around the frigid, rust-red metal railings. She is never cold. Her skin pinkens but does not prickle into bumpy gooseflesh even though she wears even less than he does. Her fashionably-cut robes with plunging necklines and climbing hems offer little protection from the weather. But whenever Teddy's feeling brave enough to touch her she is always radiating warmth. It's almost unnatural.

"What are you doing here, Dom?" he asks once. "It's so dull."

She grins, but when the question remains unanswered he repeats it.

It's not an unreasonable thing to ask. After all, she'd shown up expecting a place to stay and they had readily given her that, with no explanation required. But it is now well-past what might be considered a usual visit from a girl who was typically in the grips of heavy wanderlust. Dom's quiet for a moment, the thick red of her lips pulled downward in thought. Framed by the light of the morning sun, Teddy thinks she's more beautiful than she has a right to be.

"I think it's nearly spring now," she replies earnestly, fingers tapping against the railings.

Dominique doesn't lie very often, she isn't afraid of the truth. There is a definite kind of honesty in her answer, but Teddy isn't quite sure he gets it.

"Still too cold for swimming, though."

She laughs, hugs him, and all he can see is the red, blood red of her hair as he smoothes it with his ice cold fingers.

_V._

She doesn't shut her door, and it's a problem.

Well, it isn't as if she _blatantly_ leaves it hanging open, a wide mouth of space that leads to the bedroom she's made her own. Or, he doesn't think she does, anyway. But Teddy's noticed that Dominique has issues with forcing it all the way shut, with cutting off the doorframe by fitting the wood into the latched closed position. He tells Victoire about it once, but she brushes off his concerns with a sweep of her uninterested eyes, and so it goes on.

He sees her.

In the mornings, still dressed in her thin pajamas and sprawled out across the bed. In the afternoons, when she leads a red-faced Kent Davies into her bedroom with soft secret smiles and long, deep kisses. In the evenings, when she strips out of her robes and turns out the lights. They're glimpses only, of course, and almost always accidental, but one night he's passing by and she's there, maroon blouse unbuttoned and eyes smudged in black liner. The blouse is parted in the front, just enough, and Teddy sees swathes of pale freckled skin and soft curves and suddenly he's consumed in smoke, in fire.

She sees him.

He doesn't move, not even to take in a much-needed gulp of air. There are sparks in her eyes, again, and Teddy can't pretend not to notice this time. Her fingers remain poised at the button holes, slowly tracing the material. The corner of her glossed mouth pulls up and there is danger tucked in the folds of those lips. She reaches for the handle of the door and Teddy isn't sure if he wants her to pull it closed or throw it open. He isn't sure if he wants to walk through the fire, to let it lick and burn at the paper doll house he's living in. Instead of letting himself know the answer, Teddy turns away and makes for the fire escape.

Vic is there.

Smoking, of course. The air outside, despite the heat of the sun and the climbing temperatures, feels like a crash of bitter cold on his flushed skin. Victoire tosses the half-burned cigarette over the balcony and Teddy looks away, briefly, allows her a moment to spit out the smoke still curling in her chest. He's not going to speak out on the matter, not now. This isn't the time for exposing secrets. Instead, he reaches for her, touches the cool fabric of her satin sleeves and closes the distance between their bodies.

"Ted, what—"

He swallows the response between their lips, pressed close together. He wants to melt her, to drown in the puddled remains, to feel everything they are together all at once, in hopes it might douse out the flickering flame of desire that has sparked in him. When they break apart, his tongue is stale with the taste of her bad habits and she's breathing like she's been under water for a thousand years. Heavy, wheezing. She lifts a delicate hand to his flushed forehead, pressing it to his cheeks, his neck, down the collar of his robes.

"God, Teddy, you're on fire," she whispers, breathless.

Teddy closes his eyes and feels the ice beneath his feet begin to crack and splinter.

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A/N: Other two parts are on their way to being finished off, so let me know what you think of this bit!


	2. In Fire

A/N: This is sadder than I intended. Ah, well, c'est la vie, I suppose. One chapter left!

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_Chapter 2: In Fire_

_I._

Victoire does have a heart; it isn't made of ice and it isn't made of stone.

It's made of sinewy tissue and drowning in hot, blue blood. It sounds like _lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub_ and every time she sees Teddy the steady rhythm is interrupted by the sudden rush of chemicals swimming in the river of her veins. It's clinical and it's natural, and any Healer worth her salt knows as much. She doesn't have to like it, though. Feeling is uncomfortable. Her heart contracts more readily, more forcefully. Her whole body beats with its pulse and her temperature rises until the fire and the heat threaten to burn her up from the inside out. The bones in her ribcage aren't enough to cradle her heart, to keep it from throbbing out of her chest, and skin is just a thin layer holding all the oceans of blood and desire in one small, contained space.

Feeling is too much, it's too wonderful and it's too awful. Teddy is like that, too. Overwhelming, irresistible, crushing, with the all the force of a breaking wave. Once when she was four and he was five, Kent Davies called him a beastly half-breed after losing a game of gobstones. She'd slugged him in the mouth and his teeth cut into the delicate skin stretched over her knuckles. She'd cried, but not as embarrassingly loud as Kent Davies had. After, Teddy held her hands in his and kissed the open, bleeding wounds with his soft mouth and the salty sting made her smile, left her breathless. It is one of her first memories.

Smoking is just another word for all of that.

It's the same habit, the same unwilling and unwanted addiction to the space between heaven and hell. To watching the glow of flames swallowing the thin white paper, to letting the tendrils of smoke and fire lick and burn the cavity in her chest. It warms the blood in the winter air, it blackens and fills her up until she has to spit out the fire or it will melt her into a cold puddle of nothing. Stepping out into the night, letting the snowflakes dissolve against her skin while she indulges herself is nothing especially secret. It's just an unspoken, unsaid kind of need, in the same way that her feelings for Teddy are often only implicit. She fills her mouth with ash and speaks in smoke signals.

_Inhale, I want you. Exhale, I need you._

_Inhale, I love you. Exhale, I hate you._

_II._

Dominique was never very good at staying in one place, but she's doing an awfully good job of it now.

It's unnerving.

Victoire doesn't like it, doesn't like the way that she's beginning to get used to the red hair in the bath drain, the choking grip of her heady perfume, the place she occupies and lives in. She's a terrible roommate. She destroys everything. She breaks dishes into sharp, ceramic shards. She borrows Vic's favorite T-strap navy blue Mary Janes and snaps the heel off. She burns though an entire carton of eggs trying to make breakfast one morning, and the smoke from the fire lingers in the flat for the next few days.

She doesn't have the strength to turn her away, though. Vic will always feel the need to take care of her younger sister. To let her shatter all the dishes in the cabinets and in the sinks, then sweep away the jagged pieces before she cuts her feet on them. To let her break the heels of her shoes, snap the straps of her gowns, rip holes in the folds of her robes. To let her burn through her fridge, through her flat, through everything, until there is nothing left to ignite and then Vic will lay her cool, healing hands on her flushed face and give her more if she wants it. Dominique would never ask it of her, though, and she doesn't now.

She just takes it.

The worst part about it is she doesn't even seem to notice. She flickers, she flits, she never stops to think about what she's doing or why she's doing it. Dominique lounges on the couch that Vic had carefully chosen, splayed out and encroaching on the space between her body and the other two trying to exist in the same space. It makes Vic uncomfortable, and she shifts away from the sticky feeling of unwanted skin touching skin. At the other end, Teddy doesn't move, doesn't flinch away from it, even remotely.

Vic watches the curious way he leans into her sister's warmth and wonders how much longer it will take before they're both gone, until all that's left is ash.

_III._

She is an excellent hostess.

Teddy coerces her into throwing Dominique a kind of welcome home party, even though Vic voices the opinion that it's ridiculous since her sister had been back in England for over a month now. Victoire invites all of their cousins and some of their friends and even Kent Davies, who is Dominique's friend(-with-benefits), despite the fact that Vic thinks he's an absolute slime and no good at all for anyone let alone her baby sister. He also leaves rings on her coffee table. Still, she freshens drinks and makes polite, distant conversation with Dominique's friends (except Kent).

Teddy isn't quite as good at playing this game.

He spends far too much of the duration speaking to only specific people. The ice in the kitchen is melting, because he is too engaged in conversation with James and Dominique to remember the proper freezing charm. The fire nearly goes out in the hearth because he is too busy watching Dominique pull Kent to the dance floor, their twined bodies making slow movements together. This whole thing was his idea, and his lack of interest in doing any of the work is rage-inducing, particularly because he seems much more focused on twirling her younger sister away from Kent for a dance of his own.

Victoire is sweating in her off-white satin sleeved dress, and they have run out of liquor, and the guests of the house are beginning to overstep their boundaries in more ways than one. She closes her eyes and braces herself, but when the crest of anger crashes over her head she still can't breathe under the weight of it. She needs a cigarette. Stealing away quietly, Victoire exits to the fire escape, the small white stick already poised between her lips. Vic burns herself on the match in her haste to get it flaming, but takes a long drag from her lit cigarette before she begins soothing the throbbing fingers. They will peel and blister, but she can't be bothered to go back inside and soak them. It would be a waste of a cigarette to stamp it out just as she'd gotten it going. The spring air she exhales her smoke into is warmer than she wants it to be, and it does very little to alleviate the heat of her skin.

The nicotine floods her system, and it's a false kind of comfort but it works anyway.

_IV._

Teddy gets ill very easily.

He catches colds and viruses and he has dragon pox four times, even though you're only supposed to get it once. The changing of the seasons irritates his body's natural constitution, and so Vic has to spend the better part of the first week in April smoothing his brow and helping him adjust to the alternating chills and fever sweats caused by the sudden arrival of warmer weather. It's disguising and uncomfortable, but this seems like something you're supposed to do for the people that you love. So every time he grasps her hand with his swampy, blotchy red ones, she pretends that her first instinct isn't to pull away and crawl out of the space he's breathing in.

Vic is made all the more repulsed by the fact that she hasn't quite forgiven him for the party, and all the endless packs of cigarettes she's hid under the bed he lies in aren't enough to ease away the memory of it all. This spring's bout of illness is particularly harsh. Victoire administers potions and holds cold pieces of ice against his throat, his chest, soaking away the sweat from his skin. The heat from Teddy's body turns the cubes into drops of water that leave wet marks on her pristine cotton sheets.

"Please," he begs, his voice harsh, grave. "Please, it burns. S-she's burning me through."

Vic's hands freeze halfway through wringing out a washcloth. She sucks in a slow, steady breath through her nose, but finds the air much too humid. Much too thick, thick and heavy and bleeding into the pockets of her lungs. Teddy's mouth moves again, but Vic can't hear him; she is elsewhere, beyond a thousand leagues under the sea and Teddy is the ocean she's drowning in. The moisture from the washcloth has dribbled down her arms, past her wrists, onto her lap, but Victoire doesn't feel it, she doesn't feel anything but the cruel, steady _lub-dub, lub-dub_ and it's all too much.

It could be someone else. It could be anyone else. It could be, but it isn't.

Vic pours soothing purple potion past Teddy's chapped lips, draining it until she's sure the fever will recede from his weathered body. When the bottle is empty, Vic slides to the floor beside Teddy's prone form. She claws desperately at her little spellotaped boxes of cigarettes and nearly spills the whole thing trying to take one out. She lights up, there on the floor where she's burning, there on the floor where she's on fire, and allows herself the luxury of tears. Her ashes dust the floor and she tosses the stubs of the cigarettes across the room, but she's sure to blow the smoke away from Teddy's air.

She isn't _that_ careless.

_V._

Teddy gets well and doesn't see the cigarette stubs because he doesn't see anything.

Nothing he doesn't want to, anyway, even when she's there all but screaming for him to notice. All he seems to want to see these days are wild red curls and a laughing pair of thick lips wrapped in a glossy package of everything he thinks he's missing out on. This is a warm spring, a heavy spring, with yellow rays of sun and heady notes of daffodils and hyacinth and tulips so strong Victoire thinks she might choke on them. Vic spends her time indoors, away from the heat and the perfumes and the sound of life buzzing around everywhere. She isn't surprised to find that her sister thrives on warmer weather. She always has. Vic joins her on the fire escape one morning, silently watching the way she arches toward the light, feeds on it. Dominique stands at the very edge, perched like a bird about to take flight.

"I think it's time you found a new place to say," Victoire says slowly.

Her voice is ice; her voice is stone. But underneath that she's quavering with tears because this is the first time she's ever denied Dominique anything. She's laying claim now. She _must_. Dominique's mouth turns up at the corner and she steps away from the rusted railing. Vic's body shakes beneath her winter robes, thrumming with heat and blood and nervous energy. Dominique could upend her steady course. She could banish it, make all her bravery evaporate and disperse into nothingness if she just asked to stay. Vic knows what her answer would be. Vic knows she's always been the weak one. But then Dominique says "alright," like its nothing, and her body is simmering with the feeling of _victory_.

"Bit crowded, anyway," Dom murmurs, digging in the pocket of her robes.

Her fingers find what they've been searching for and she extracts a cigarette. As she lights it with a match and inhales, Vic watches in envy. Envy of the heat and smoke flowering in her lungs, the sure swell of chemical relief flooding head to toe in her body. High on her triumphs, she takes from her sister because she can, now. Vic snatches the cigarette from Dom's long white fingers, stubbing out the smoldering orange tip with clinical preciseness before tossing it over the railing to fall somewhere below. She will grow in strength, she will be what she hasn't been before.

"You shouldn't smoke, Dominique."

Her disproval does nothing to quell her sister's satisfaction. She grins that terrible grin, red lips curled back over white teeth. A queasy feeling settles over Victoire at the sight. Little Red Riding Hood has swallowed the wolf and become him. Dom steps forward, hair shining scarlet in the sun's sure yellow rays, but Vic refuses to move away and will not give ground.

"Neither should you," Dom says, pulling out a familiar pack of cigarettes with remnants of sticky spellotape mangled on the box.

And oh, it _burns_.

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A/N: I didn't intentionally set out to make Victoire the victim, but you'll get some sympathetic Dom in the next chapter. Please, please, please, review! It will fuel my creativity and keep me writing! Thanks for reading!


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